to make someone understand what you yourself don't understand? — Agent Smith

If your actions serve as an example, then someone else could learn a principle which you yourself do not grasp. For example, if you poke your hand in the fire and withdraw it in pain, clearly you did not understand the meaning of fire, but I could grasp it by observing you.

Aye!

to make someone understand what you yourself don't understand? — Agent Smith

I see this attempted on TPF when someone starts talking about quantum theory or relativity. Now, there are a few individuals on the site who know what they claim to know, but others shovel out the terminologies and key words from stockpiles only a few centimeters thick, thinking they do understand while not knowing the extent of their misconceptions. To some extent this is due to books and articles attempting to convey information to the masses in ways palatable to those masses.

Sean Carroll is now attempting to remedy this unfortunate practice by going deeper into the mathematical basis of ideas in physics and cosmology in a book describing popular science notions.

One deplorable example I see over and over here is "curvature of space", exemplified by the ubiquitous image of the Earth sinking into a basketball net of gravity.

:up:

Educators need to be given points for creativity when they use relatable analogies; nonetheless, a poor analogy can do more harm than good.

Mathematics is a world unto itself and its concepts probably don't map onto mundane, earthly experiences as much as we'd have preferred; this rendering mathematics quite an esoteric subject, giving it a mystical quality of sorts. All we can do is then find a best match between a mathematical idea and something everyone's experienced and hope for the best, oui monsieur?